"Thelma & Louise" by MGM, Ridley Scott director
Actor and women’s advocate Geena Davis — Thelma in the 1991 hit ‘neo-feminist’ movie Thelma & Louise — was in Seattle Monday evening calling for a renewed women’s movement worldwide.
Women 3.0
“We’re due for a resurgence of the women’s movement,” Davis said to a packed room at Seattle Town Hall. Though the Seattle crowd was by far mostly women and girls, she spoke earlier in the day on the Microsoft campus in Redmond to a packed room of mostly men. The event was sponsored by Global Washington.
Davis, who was in town stumping for her philanthropy, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, spent a lot of time fielding questions and criticizing the way women are portrayed — and perceived — in Hollywood and throughout the media. But her concerns are much more global.
Davis repeatedly emphasized that many, if not all, of the international community’s goals (the Millennium Development Goals) for fighting poverty and improving the welfare of those living in the poorest parts of the world depend upon improving the circumstances of women and girls.
“We need to make people realize that these issues, of social justice and poverty, are women’s issues,” she said. “It’s a mistake to think there are ‘women’s issues’ over here and these other problems over there.”
Meryl Schenker, www.merylschenker.com
Geena Davis, with Chris Grumm, left, Andrea Taylor, center, at Seattle Town Hall